Coming here from the post on Slashdot. I like several features of this currency, and have a few questions.
Cold staking and decentralized stake pooling. Sounds great but how?
After a stake ticket is purchased, there is no need for the funds used to purchase that ticket to be online.
Example: You used 100 coins to buy a stake ticket, which requires a transaction be created, signed and broadcast to the network. After a maturity delay the ticket is eligible for selection in a lottery, and when the ticket is selected, it can be voted without having the original wallet used to purchase the ticket online. This is what is meant by "cold staking". The funds used to purchase tickets need not ever be "hot" either, it can be done using a cold wallet.
Voting/polling is good. But why is the plan to split blocks 60% with miners and 40% with stakers? Why not make it an even split?
Your numbers are slightly off, the split is 60% PoW, 30% PoS, 10% dev subsidy. PoW has real and substantial hardware costs associated with it, so we felt it made more sense to have this subsidy higher than the PoS subsidy. The 30% PoS subsidy was chosen so that a semi-passive rate of return on holding coins was not absurdly high.
Immutable tx ids, excellent.
Script enhancements and new OP codes, what will these be and for what purpose?
The stake transactions have new opcodes. These opcodes allow users to purchase tickets (SSTX), vote tickets when selected in the lottery (SSGEN), and revoke tickets (SSRTX).
Self-funded development via block subsidy, 10%. I feel this is way too much of a cut. Please consider reducing it by a lot or withdrawing these plans altogether considering you're also taking 4% of the 21 million total premine.
While I understand that you may feel 10% is too high a rate, as someone who has funded a lot of development work over the past 5 years, I disagree with your assessment. At a 10% subsidy rate, the dev organization will accumulate approximately 302,000 decred during its first year. If we assume the value of 1 decred averages to USD 1.00 over the first year, this means we'll have USD 302K to spend on development work. This is a small amount of funding and can pay for 3-4 full time developers for 1 year, so if we went below 10% dev subsidy it would mean the project cannot fund itself unless its exchange rate is well over USD 1.00 per decred.
The 4% of the premine was paid for in USD, BTC and labor by Company 0 and its developers. Unlike other projects, we did not push the risk of failure onto the community by asking them to fund the work. We have made an effort to lead with our deliverables in a niche where there is lots of vaporware and questionable offerings. As our btcsuite work shows, this work has been going on for years, even without any funding except from me.
"Simple GPU miner." I'd look at getting mining Decred supported in a mature mining program like bfgminer or sgminer instead of rolling something new. These mature mining programs support AMD Overdrive features already, so that means overclocking, temperature reading, etc built-in. Ethminer, the miner program for Ethereum, was less useful without these features.
We will consider these suggestions, but keep in mind that too much scope creep means our planned deliverables will slip. There is a lot of infrastructure that goes along with a cryptocurrency, and we're trying to get it all out in a timely fashion without ruining our timeline.
